Autistic individuals have differences in sensory processing.\u00a0\u00a0 They may have perfect vision according to an eye chart…perfect hearing when tested with pure tone audiometry–and yet be unable to “see” and “hear” what others see and hear.\u00a0\u00a0 In addition, autistic individuals react to environmental inputs others tend to ignore, and do not react to those others find important.\u00a0 Thus the autistic child’s near-universal intolerance of tags in the back of shirts, seams in socks,\u00a0 “floaters” in orange juice, and inability to judge the speed of oncoming traffic when crossing the street.<\/p>\n
One of my textbooks on autism dismissed the idea that sensory processing problems could be central to autism because the writer saw no way that these differences could result in the more obvious social and language deficits.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 That person clearly had no experience in programming computers, where “garbage in, garbage out” is a common mantra.<\/p>\n
If a person is not getting the same sensory information in, they will not experience the world the same–and will not behave the same.\u00a0\u00a0 The color blind person does not see that the traffic light is red–and does not stop unless its position warns him.\u00a0\u00a0 Normal social interaction rests on the senses–on our ability to extract information from our senses, assign meaning to it, and respond in a way our society approves.<\/p>\n
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One fairly common problem in children with language delays (including autistic children but not limited to them) is the inability to capture very brief auditory stimuli…they can hear a sustained tone, but not a brief sound–such as a consonant like \/d\/ or \/p\/ or \/t\/ .\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Vowels last longer (and are emphasized even more when people try to slow down their speech) but vowels alone sound like “mooing” (a term used by Temple Grandin in describing what speech sounded like to her as a child.)\u00a0\u00a0 A child needs to build up the phonological library of his\/her native language–and to do that must be able to capture all the sounds.<\/p>\n
It’s possible to train the brain to capture sounds it could not capture at first (Paula Tallal’s work on this, including developing a computer program that artificially lengthens consonant sounds, is brilliant.)\u00a0\u00a0 Without such help,\u00a0 verbal language is severely delayed, as the child must hear sounds to be able to copy them.\u00a0\u00a0 In addition to the sounds of the language, verbal communication carries other channels of meaning–rate of speech, prosody, loudness, tone of voice–all of them expressing socially important meanings about the speaker’s intent and emotional state.\u00a0\u00a0 The very same words can be used to mean different things (a constant annoyance for many autistic persons.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Suzette Hayden Elgin’s books on verbal abuse describe in detail how these details change meaning.<\/p>\n
Autistic children may also have trouble with rapid visual input…essential to good social interaction.\u00a0\u00a0 Communication is far more than verbal language, and many of the social signals are carried by brief (sometimes even unconscious) movements of the eyes, the small muscles in the face (tightening an eyelid, tensing cheek muscles on one side, etc.)\u00a0 which the child may not capture.\u00a0\u00a0 If you do not see the eyelids flicker, the lips twitch and release, the brows lift and fall,\u00a0\u00a0 you cannot follow a conversational partner’s move from interested to bored, from serious to annoyed to angry.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Again, training can help (presenting these expressions as static images, then increasing the speed of movement in stages.<\/p>\n
The autistic child is like an adult dropped into a foreign culture where no one speaks his language, no one eats the “right” foods, all the facial expressions and gestures are different.\u00a0\u00a0 Most monolingual people retreat, when in a foreign country, into tourist enclaves…they want to find someone who speaks their language, someone who likes what they like.\u00a0\u00a0 Even the more adventurous are likely to spend some time in a more comfortable environment.\u00a0 But the autistic infant and child has no way to retreat other than withdrawal–only if the parents and other caregivers trouble to learn from the child’s reactions what is comfortable and what is not, and create a safe zone,\u00a0 and provide “translations”, will the child be motivated to venture out farther.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Autistic individuals have differences in sensory processing.\u00a0\u00a0 They may have perfect vision according to an eye chart…perfect hearing when tested with pure tone audiometry–and yet be unable to “see” and “hear” what others see and hear.\u00a0\u00a0 In addition, autistic individuals react to environmental inputs others tend to ignore, and do not react to those others […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,46,10],"tags":[13,7],"class_list":["post-24","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-on-the-spectrum","category-sensory-processing","category-socialization","tag-communication","tag-sensory-processing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25,"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24\/revisions\/25"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}